Vet bills: More pets being put down due to rising costs, BBC told
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce9xjmz70m5o
Posted by Mein_Bergkamp
Vet bills: More pets being put down due to rising costs, BBC told
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce9xjmz70m5o
Posted by Mein_Bergkamp
23 Comments
Vets will try anything to achieve more money.
The most recent prescription medication was £85 every two weeks, or I could buy it online for £11.
I’ve read this on Reddit before and it rings pretty true:
>Plants are the new pets,
>Pets are the new kids,
>Kids are like exotic animals: you need to be crazy or rich to have them.
Cost of everything is pushing people further into loneliness.
Just an appointment can cost you £40.
My dog was limping once and took him in to find out he was absolutely fine. Still cost a boat load.
Vets know exactly what they’ve got with their prices and people’s emotional attachment to their pets
We got a pair of kittens which were fine for 2 weeks. One of them started to not walk correctly and went to sleep with no response except heart beating. Took her to the vets and had to heartbreakingly make the decision to put her down due to the costs for the tests and likely surgery costs that we were quoted in the thousands.
One of my cats recently gave us a good scare when she started refusing food, acting sick and vomiting and defecating blood.
Boarding it in the vet for the day, quick blood panel and the medication put us over £400.
And that was without a hospital visit for scans and further testing. I was informed this would be around £3k if necessary.
Apparently it was some food poisoning and luckily she went through it with the given medication.
Since that, both my cats are insured.
Vet bills have become insane.
Guardian did this last year.
I was shocked at how closed network the whole thing was
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/apr/06/vet-who-really-profits-from-poorly-pets
It does not help that shelters are full, mostly because they are massive gatekeepers on who can adopt pets. It is also why the new number of pets being abandoned is increasing too.
The overnight observations is the biggest scam going. They play on your emotions and make you feel they’ll die if you don’t pay a random number between £200 and £1000, depending on what it looks like you can afford
Vets are out of control, their pricing is insane and unaffordable without insurance and even then it caps out.
A few reasons behind this.
First is the cost of living crisis. Rent, bills, cost of medicines, cost of equipment and disposables, all have gone up. Vet salaries have always been poor and have been getting worse, and it has finally got to the point that vets are just quitting. All of this means that vet practices need to charge more, in part to pay staff more.
Second is expectations. The article mentions a cat with a brain tumour. 20 years ago, very few vets would even be able to diagnose that sort of thing accurately, let alone treat it. Nowadays diagnosis and treatment is much closer to human medicine, but is *expensive.* 20 years ago that cat would just have been put down anyway. Nowadays you have the option to treat, but it’ll cost you. Same is true across the board – complex surgeries, therapy, medication, all sorts. All available, all expensive. It doesn’t help that most people are completely isolated from the actual cost of medical treatment, by the NHS.
The whole ‘corporate takeover’ is definitely a factor too, and the CMA are rightly looking into it. There is a chance that they’ll enforce more competition, but bluntly that will be unlikely to decrease costs that much, as the profit margins the corps are earning aren’t that high. Higher than the old partnerships, but that wouldn’t be hard – they were often right on the boundary of going out of business. The big corporates are at least sustainable – they generally pay their staff better, and actually have the capital to invest in the business. I can’t see things going back to the old independents, at least until people are happy to pay more.
Meanwhile even the charities (like the PDSA) are struggling. Costs going up, donations going down, expectations rising.
Sadly this doesn’t surprise me at all. Our greyhound shattered her leg jumping off the bed. We did not have insurance (prohibitively expensive for us at the time).
Between surgeries, follow ups, x-rays, a CT scan, and medication, it cost us £12,500, and even then unfortunately there were complications in her recovery, and we ended up having to say goodbye to her at the end of last month, 3 months after the injury itself. Further surgery (all in probably another £10k) would have possibly helped but there was no guarantee, and we had zero chance of paying for it.
That injury drained our wedding fund. We’d do it again. We did our best for her but in any other circumstance we just flat out wouldn’t have had the money to do anything to help her.
Had my dog jabbed yesterday, just boosters. £90. I swear it was only 45 when we took him last
Pets will go the same way as kids soon. You’d be mad to have them
Had two cats that both got cancer (brother and sister). Had insurance but even then the 20% I had to cover and excess meant that it was still very expensive to even get the first diagnosed. Didn’t bother when then the second one started showing signs, exactly the same symptoms and lump in the same place so we just made the decision to have her euthanised when she deteriorated. Definitely put me off pets for life, but sadly that’s the risk.
Would have got more, but with pet food / insurance / vaccination/ potential injury etc it’s just not affordable.
My vet wanted to charge me £12 for 5 Piriton tablets. It was only when I asked if the ones I had at home would be ok that they said yes. That was on top of a £55 consultation fee for 5 minutes with the vet.
As I said further up, they charge £24 for a written prescription if you want to get the medication online, but there’s no charge for the prescription itself if you buy the medication from them. So it’s not always cheaper to source it yourself. They also charged me £25 for a small bottle of eye drops that are about £3 from Boots. A trip to Boots with a pretend squinting eye and I had a bottle to keep in the fridge in preparation for next time.
I was charged over £2000 by Pet Doctors to treat my cat’s abscess. That’s draining it, giving antibiotics and one night in a cage. I don’t begrudge spending the money for the care he needs – but that’s the cost of a week on a sunny beach for a small family. How on earth can such a small and readily treatable condition justify that amount of money?
People think its alot due to the NHS subsidising human treatment. Go to the US and you see the real costs of medication and treatments like xrays etc
Same applies for vets, they’re a private business
My dog randomly got ill and was vomiting and sicking up blood.
I rushed her to vets, mid week, non emergency, they kept her overnight, put her on a drip, provided some medication, £1000 please.
They literally did nothing to stop her illness, never told us what it was, solely kept her in to keep her hydrated and charged us a grand for the privilege.
About a year to 18months later it happened again, me and my wife took turns looking after her, kept her hydrated ourselves, monitored her drinking and within a few days she was back to her normal self.
Vets are an actual disgrace, even the good ones these days are taking people for a ride. I love my dog, but by god i wont have another solely because of vet fee’s and insurance.
Another story lol; she has a lump on her back, i took her to the vets and they said they “could” put her under, take a sample and send it off for a biopsy. I said well what happens then, and they go well if its cancer we put her under and remove it. I said well wouldnt you just take it all out when you do the biopsy, woman was like ye i mean we could.
I just said you know what, she’s old, i dont want to risk her going under and not waking up, she seems fine, shes not in discomfort, id rather just leave it and let nature take its course. Dogs still right as rain (before anyone asks), so can only assume its some sort of cyst etc.
I read this after reading about the Bezos wedding and the private jets. I feel quite sick and angry with the world.
Our 15-year-old cat developed heart and thyroid problems. Ascites too. Possible lymphoma too. We were quoted a scan that cost a grand. We’d already spent about £400 to get to that point on thyroid medicine. It might have been just a heart issue, in which case we could have medicated following a scan. But it just felt like too much was going on.
£600 for private euthernasia, because suddenly it felt very urgent.
Then the insurance said that each illness, the heart, tooth, and thyroid were all separate issues and mostly fell below the excess figure. So we got about £150 back after 6 years of paying.
I’m now of the opinion that you should not be treating animals in late life as it’s just wildly expensive and pretty cruel (obviously more in cases like mine). And even insurance feels a bit stupid. We’d have been better off just saving the bill for 6 years, though I get there are circumstances where costs could be way larger.
There’s a lot of misinformed people in this thread and in the world generally.
Prices have increased, prices have increased for everything. Vets are no different. Compare the prices of food from 2015 to now, they’ve increased. Your mortgage? Increased. Your rent? Increased. Your energy bills? Increased. Everything has increased in price. All the costs to a business have also increased, and that gets passed onto the consumer. That’s how it works. That’s you’re paying more for you food now than you did 10 years ago.
The profit margins vets run at are small. If they didn’t increase their prices, they’d go out of business, then there wouldn’t be any vets.
There is no NHS for pets, it’s been great if there was. I’m all for it. But good luck to any political party that wants to put that policy forward, and telling everyone that it’s going to increase their taxes. Real vote winner that one…
The dates 2015 -2023 as given by the article. There have been several high profile events that affected costs to both the public and businesses. Starting with Brexit, which immediately pushed up the cost of drugs to vet practices.
Private healthcare is expensive. If you want a pet, insure the fucking thing. People will complain it’s a scam or a waste of money, but those people are morons. They think insurance is a scam, then cry online when they need it. It’s saved us 10’s of 1000’s of £’s with our pets over the years. Not once in that article is the word ‘insurance’ mentioned, shameful really.
And an elderly cat going deaf has nothing to do with it’s heart condition. It went deaf because it’s fucking old, and it most likely reached that old age thanks to it’s heart condition being treated properly by it’s vet. And what thanks does the vet get? They get slated by an owner that’s too dense to insure their pet.
I asked my vet about teeth cleaning for my dog, as he gets a bit feisty when anyone tries interfering with his mouth. I was quoted £400 for anaesthetic and teeth cleaning/tooth x Ray. This did not cover fixing any problem that may have been identified by the X-ray, e.g. tooth extraction. Costs are too high.
Foreign conglomerate equity firms buying up Vet chains and suffocating the service and care for every penny regardless of the detriment to society. I wish the government would step in to help
Vet bills are usually the only window into how expensive healthcare is as most never seep private treatment.